But I Want to See
with My Own Eyes . . .
the Victim Rise-Up and
Embrace His Murderer

Ivan Karamazov . . . studied math, lost an arm in the Second World War, was arrested at the end of the war because
he declared that the way Germany was occupied and conquered, and the people humiliated, was unsocialistic. He
spent years in the camps, but after his rehabilitation he took
up his studies again. He has a little income, is very frugal,
given to silence, and occasionally makes some money on the
side as a reader in a music publishing house. Some people
take him to be an informer; he smiles a rather tortured smile
when someone reads out loud from the Bible.

This is Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov translated into the reality of our time by Heinrich Böll. The man of possibility from the
realm of poetry is here transposed into a figure of reality. Ivan,
the intellectual and the poet, the bitter-end thinker and challenger
of the devil (his twin brother) has been transformed into a laconic
fellow -- a humble person who listens to music and has long since
forgotten his powerful charges against God's corrupt world, the
misery of children, and the Luciferian practices of the Roman
Catholic church.

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